The WW2 cipher pigeon message we’ve been trying to crack is addressed to “X02″… which is what, exactly?

X02

Speculation in the initial Daily Mail article was that X02 was a code denoting RAF Bomber Command in High Wycombe. However, against that notion runs the facts that (a) the message was written on an Army Pigeon Message pad, (b) the message was inside a red-coloured (probably British Army) canister, and (c) the British Army enciphered much of its communications.

The problem here is that even though this “Bomber Command” suggestion is therefore fairly threadbare, nobody has yet come up with any properly credible alternatives. It appeared to be yet another aspect of the message that was destined to stay mysterious.

But now I can reveal what X02 actually means.

If you spend the day in the archives at the Royal Signals Museum in Blandford Forum, Dorset (as Stu Rutter and I did yesterday), you might just happen to ask their very helpful archivist if the museum’s archives contains any boxes on codes and ciphers cyphers. And you might then just happen to find at the bottom of one of the two boxes of files a small blue handbook:-

army-wireless-operating-signals-1941

This booklet briefly describes a selection of common “X-codes” used in signalling, most of which are made up of “X” followed by three digits. (There is also a large set of three-letter Q-codes and a large set of three-letter Z-codes.)

army-wireless-instructions

However, there’s one very specific exception to the three-digit X-code layout: and that is for codes beginning with “X0”, which are specifically to do with addressees:-

army-wireless-addressees

Hence “X0234” would mean “pass to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th addressees”. In the case of our pigeon message, “X02” simply means “pass to the 2nd addressee“. Which would strongly imply that the (already very short) ciphertext includes at least two addressees. (It was perfectly normal Army practice to include addressees inside ciphertexts: an encrypted address / addressee was known as a codress, while an encrypted address that was concealed within a message (rather than in a consistent place) was known as a “buried codress”.)

And that’s basically it: the mystery of the X02 solved.

OK, I’m sorry Stu & I weren’t yet able to crack the rest of our cipher pigeon’s message, but rest assured we’re hot on its trail… 🙂

According to Stu Rutter’s latest raid on the National Archives, the Allies’ WW2 “Typex” cipher used a single five-letter indicator, placed both at the start and end of messages [so says WO 208/5109, anyway]: and so he concludes that Typex was very probably the system used by our wonderfully mysterious WW2 pigeon cipher. Having said that, I do wonder whether the first five plaintext letters will turn out to be “QQQQQ”, as I recall that many messages had this dummy text group added at the start to avoid stereotyped messages, even though it was itself an even more stereotypical sequence. Perhaps combining this with the ciphertext might let us work back to the rotor contents and settings… just a thought!

[Typex remains a great working hypothesis, though personally I’d still like to see how the Air Support Syllabic Cipher (War Office document BX 724) and Royal Engineer Syllabic Cipher (War Office document BX 724/RE) worked. But that’s another story!]

Intriguingly, GCHQ’s archives holds a Typex document which Stu would understandably like to get access to: and at last weekend’s Big Bang Science Fair at London’s ExCel venue (which my son thought was really fantastic), I was very pleasantly surprised to bump into the GCHQ Historian hard at work on the GCHQ stand, busily helping children encipher their own Enigma messages for Bletchley Park’s rebuilt Bombe to try to crack. He told me that GCHQ releases documents more according to security-related criteria than in response to Freedom of Information requests: and even though he would send us through the appropriate paperwork to fill out, we should necessarily be somewhat patient… it’s no secret that it’s not the fastest of processes (for example, they released the last Enigma file only last year). Fingers crossed that all goes through!

Incidentally, the Americans didn’t think Typex was properly fit for purpose, sniffily describing it as “nothing but a glorified German Enigma, with 5 rotors instead of 3 and with arrangements for printing” (NARA: RG 457 HCC Box 804 NR 2323, quoted in Ratcliff “Delusions of Intelligence”, p.167), while British cryptologists also saw flaws in Typex “as early as 1940”, though their recommendations as to how to work around them seem to have been acted upon (“Delusions”, p.179). Yet even though the Germans knew exactly how Typex worked, they had “abandoned work on it” prior to 1942, presumably because of its structural similarity to their own ‘unbreakable’ Enigma variants (“Delusions”, p.178 and p.202).

But here’s something to do with Typex that’s rather interesting (and more social history than overtly cryptographic) which I liked, and think you may well like too. 🙂

Having posted a few days ago on the British Army’s pervasive use of ciphers for pigeon messages, I was intrigued to read about the Army “cipher room” at Arundel Castle mentioned by Bill Button: and so decided to snoop around the web for further mentions of WW2 cipher rooms. The nicest things I dug up by far were three reminiscences made by Jessie Dunlop in 2004 (courtesy of her daughter Ann Wild) on the BBC’s “People’s War” website. Rather delightfully, these described her wartime cipher experiences, firstly at Low Grade Cipher School in Eccleston Square, secondly at High Grade Cipher School in Half Moon Lane, London, and then finally at SHAEF Supreme headquarters in an Underground tunnel between Goodge Street and Warren Street Station, at which time she met her future husband Jack.

Confusingly, she misremembered Typex as “xyco” (which is why these posts didn’t show up in web searches), but that’s entirely to be expected – it was a very long time ago, after all. In a follow-up comment from 2004, she further described how xyco / Typex was used:-

“I think it was modelled on the Enigma. It had several drums in the top with a lid to be lifted to reach these. The first one was static and was set each day with the beginning of the day’s code. The rest were also set each day but they revolved. A keyboard like a typewriter was below these and on this the message was typed in. It came out in groups of letters, I think. Sometimes we could add what was called a scrambler, an electrical gadget which we plugged in if the the message was top secret. This was indicated at the end of the message in the code.”

And so it would seem that in the pigeon cipher, we’re looking at
* an enciphered Army message (quite possibly in Typex);
* not sent during Operation Overlord (i.e. not on D-Day or shortly after); and
* not top secret (and hence not using any kind of scrambler).

This is really useful, because it probably means that Stu Rutter need not worry about scramblers or reflectors (I think): for if we are looking at a non-top-secret Typex message, it probably wasn’t using a scrambler. So as long as he has an accurate copy of the the contents and structure of the rotors and the way the Typex worked, who’s to say that Stu’s JavaScript simuator won’t be able to give us the answer? If so, it might arguably be the first Typex message ever decrypted by anyone… and how cool would that be? 😉

Incidentally, one great sanity check might be to ask the Royal Signals Museum in Blandford, Dorset if they could use their Typex machine to encipher some test messages with various rotor settings to validate Stu’s simulator. In return, perhaps they might like to have his simulator on display next to their machine, so that visitors can try it out for (virtually) real? That would be good for everyone, I think. 🙂

Anyway, here’s a question for you all: how can we find out if Jessie Dunlop – or indeed anyone else who worked on British Army High Grade Ciphers, whether in SHAEF or elsewhere – is still alive? Perhaps having her looking at our pigeon message might trigger some memories of how it all worked. Something to think about! 🙂

pigeon-head

Now here’s an interesting thing. I’ve just read “From El Alamein to the Alps with Pigeons” by Bill Button (who used to write a pigeon column for The Racing Pigeon Weekly under the name “Uno Solo”), which relates – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – his WW2 experiences running pigeon lofts in North Africa and Italy.

I rather enjoyed it, because it brought across a lot of the feeling Sigm (signalmen) had for their pigeons. If a pigeon arrived back injured, they did their best to sort it out and patch it up with whatever they had to hand: and we tend to forget that the Axis aside, war pigeons perpetually had to deal with the threat of their Other Enemy… hawks, hungry for a slice of pigeon pie (though without the pie). No wonder they often flew faster than a mile every minute. 😉

However, for our purposes, page 1 tells us something simple and straightforward that changes our basic perspective on the problem we face. Early in the war, Button had been drafted to a civilian loft in Hurstpierpoint (in West Sussex) owned by a Mr Greer, which supplied 6-12 birds to the Armed Forces (normally the Army) ever 2-3 days:-

When the birds returned to the ‘home’ loft we had to deliver the messages to what I believe was Arundel Castle. Although we saw many of the messages, they meant nothing to us, having been written in cipher. On arrival as the Castle, we had to report to the cipher room and hand over the messages. Entry was forbidden.

And so there you have it. Contrary to what you might think, the British Army sent pigeon messages in cipher throughout the war. Hence the whole romantic notion that what we are looking at could only have been sent in high desperation from France on D-Day rather evaporates… it could have been sent pretty much any time from late 1940 onwards, and for one or more of a whole panoply of reasons.

In fact, because [as Mike Moor helpfully pointed out (and more on that another time)] pigeon pads sent out to the British Army by Wing House for D-Day were overstamped “OPERATIONAL MESSAGE – Telephone to War Office Signal Office, WHITEHALL 9400“, there is a strong case to be made that D-Day is in fact the one day this message could not have been sent.

Thus does History iterate slowly towards a better picture of what actually happened. 🙂

Just the merest hint of a nudge to your collective set of virtual elbows, to remind you that the first Voynich London pub meet for basically ages is this evening (7th March 2013), at The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping. Though having said that, all cipher mysteries are fair game, not just the Voynich Manuscript: hence cipher pigeon fanciers and armchair treasure hunters are more than welcome to come along too. Plenty of room for everyone!

I’ll be there from 6.15pm or so, hoping to catch up on the latest Euro cipher gossip from Gotha and elsewhere, courtesy of Herr Cipher Skeptic himself, Klaus Schmeh, who’s on a flying visit to London having had a swift peek at the various enciphered books in the British Library (“The Subtlety of Witches”, etc). So if you can make your way to Wapping Wall for even half an hour, it would be really great to see you.

[Even stronger nudge: Tony Gaffney, what on earth do I have to do to persuade you to come along? I haven’t seen you in 25 years or so!]

Just so you know: if it’s a nice evening (or if someone happens to bring their dog along with them, John 🙂 ), the chances are we’ll be located in the terraced area through the pub to the back left (looking out over the Thames). Otherwise, we could be anywhere on the pub’s two floors, depending on how busy it happens to be. Looking forward to it!

If you have been following the coverage here of the recent WW2 cipher pigeon story with more than the bleariest of eyes, you’ll know that I’ve repeatedly speculated whether its “W Stot Sjt” signature might well have actually been written by Serjeant William Stout of the Royal Engineers. Though (as we’ve already seen) he died not long after D-Day, I wondered whether it might be possible to find out more about his story by tracking down surviving members of his family and asking them.

Just before Christmas, I finally managed to get in contact with Stout’s daughter, and asked if she could see if she had a copy of his signature or his handwriting. Delightfully, I received from her this last week a small package containing some wartime photographs of her father, a photograph of his grave taken in 1948, and – most surprisingly of all – a 1940 field service post card (“Army Form A. 2042 / R.A.F. Form No. 1929”). Such postcards contained a list of barely informative sentences (“I am quite well”, etc), out of which the sender crossed all those lines that did not apply: there’s an example online here.

Aha, I thought: will the signature pencilled on it turn out to match the signature on the pigeon cipher form? After some lightweight image processing, I placed the two side by side so as to compare them as reliably as I could…

w-stout-signature-comparison-small

You’ve worked out the answer already, I think: which is that the two names were clearly not written by the same person. Which is a shame: but despite not being a proof, it’s still very far from a disproof. In the busy fog of war, a message could easily have been written by one person (the sender), enciphered and/or copied by a second (the signaller), and then sent by pigeon by a third (the pigeon handler).

In fact, various historians have already commented to me that they thought it quite unlikely that a Serjeant in the R.E. would have had the responsibility (or even the practical means) for enciphering a message in the field. So the fact that our enciphered pigeon message was not written by Serjeant Stout might arguably make more sense than if it had been… but it’s hard to be sure either way.

All the same, it has to be said that the best cipher mysteries tend to yield their secrets slowly (at best): so perhaps we shall have to resign ourselves to waiting a little longer yet for a pigeony breakthrough… we shall see!

Today I received a nice little package of stuff from Holland, courtesy of Rob van Meel, who reprints old military manuals – mostly British, but a few American and German ones too. I get the impression these are mainly for people with an interest in reenactment / war games rather than historians and researchers per se, but given a healthy area of overlap there’s surely room for everyone at the table. 😉

Unsurprisingly, I was most interested in the various Slidex-related manuals Rob had, particularly an updated release of the Slidex manual dated 1st December 1944 (i.e. six months after D-Day). You see, Slidex originated as a system where operators used only a single letter for each of the twelve slots on the horizontal cursor: yet we have later examples where two letters went in each slot (and you could choose either one to signify that column).

If our pigeon cipher is a bigram cipher, then it is one that appears to use 24 letters in its horizontal cursor. So if it was enciphered using Slidex (which seems to be the code most widely used on D-Day), it would have to have used the two-letters-per-slot version. Hence the big question I wanted to try to answer was… when did the changeover from one-letter-per-slot to two-letters-per-slot Slidex happen?

However, going through the revised Slidex manual, it became abundantly clear to me that even in December 1944, the British Armed Forces were still using single-letter-per-slot Slidex, which would seem to rule out Slidex’s having been used in the pigeon cipher before 1945.

At the same time, the two pigeons were (according to their NURP references) born in 1937 and 1940: and the older of the two would have been right at the end of its carrying days in summer 1944, let alone in 1945. As a result, the Venn diagrammatic intersection of possibility (i.e. between the [old pigeon] circle and the [revised Slidex] circle) is shrinking all the time.

Right now, I don’t know what the answer to all this is: to my eyes, what we’re looking at seems a bit more like a bigram cipher than a machine cipher, but even that’s far from certain either way. All the ‘best’ cipher mysteries seem to take a somewhat sadistic pleasure in continuously oscillating either side of the shaky line between certain and uncertain, and this one is surely no exception.

Yet there were other low grade bigram ciphers in use during WW2: two in particular were an Air Support bigram cipher and a Royal Engineers syllabic cipher. These may well be the same two variants of the Syllabic Cipher introduced in 1942 as per Stu Rutter’s page, which I believe were known as BX 724 and BX 724/RE respectively.

I’ve already written to several army museums and archives asking if they have either of these, but so far without any luck. Any suggestions as to private collectors (or collections) who may have a copy of either? Unless you have a better idea, this would seem to be the next sensible thing to check, and the various National Archives files Stu & I checked didn’t seem to have any description of it at all.

In short: probably not Slidex, so remains a work in progress. 😉

It’s been a while, but the time has finally come round for another Voynich London pub meet, on Thursday 7th March 2013 at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, a pub with its own gallows and noose (though admittedly these days it’s Somali pirates who get all the press rather than privateers). I’ll be there from 6pm onwards, hope to see some of you there too!

prospect-of-whitby

The reason for the weekday (i.e. not the usual Sunday) is that German cipher mystery skeptic Klaus Schmeh is over in the UK for a very few days & the 7th is the only evening he can squeeze into his packed schedule. I can’t change that and would like to catch up with him, so what’s a Cipher Mysteries blogger to do? Make do with the cards he’s dealt, that’s what… it is what it is.

This has, of course, been Schmeh Week on Cipher Mysteries, what with The Gentlemen’s Cipher from Klaus’ blog and this week’s diplomatic cipher conference in Gotha. So if (like me) you’d like to chat with Klaus about the conference, or perhaps chat with me about cipher stuff (if reading all my posts isn’t a rich enough diet for you), then feel free to swing along to Wapping. WW2 cipher pigeon fans welcome too! Cheers! 🙂

A few days ago I posted a list of open questions about the dead cipher pigeon, really as a way of externalizing the annoyance I felt from knowing so few basic facts. To my great delight, Mike Moor from Melbourne and (well-known military history buff) Christos T. stepped forward with a whole wheelbarrowful of answers. And here they are…

“Did any British pigeon handlers ever use “lib.” as an abbreviation?”

Mike Moor points out that the first message sent back on D-Day was by Reuters reporter Montague Taylor, attached to the eg of the war-seasoned (and subsequently Dickin-Medal-receiving!) carrier pigeon Gustav [NPS.42.31066]. At the bottom of the image (clearly on an RAF pigeon message pad), it says “Liberated 0830” (click to see the full message):-

“Why can’t I find a single other message written on the same printed pigeon service pad?”

For this, Mike Moor points to a message sent by Major General Roberts on a page talking about the Canadian armed forces’ involvement in World War Two. [Incidentally, the abortive Canadian raid on Dieppe was known as “Operation Rutter”, I wonder if Stu R knew that?] Even though the quality of the scan is frankly diabolical, it’s very much better than nothing at all, and tells us that this our pigeon message was (without any real doubt) an Army Pigeon Service message pad.

Mike also notes that this was an “Army Book 418B”, the updated version of the Army Book 418 used for pigeon messages in the First World War. It turns out that the National Army Museum near Sloane Square tube in London has an Army Book 418B in its collection described as “Army Book 418B, Pigeon Service Message Book, 1942”, accession number “1975-06-35”: it would be cool to ask the curators there to have a closer look.

“Was the pigeon message we have a hectograph or a carbon copy?”

Mike Moor notes “It is a carbon copy pad with 1 original retained in the book and 2 carbon copies made – which lines up with what you’d expect from the message i.e. 2 copies sent and the blue text of the cipher looks a lot like a carbon copy + black amendments by a second hand presumably prior to sending.” Excellent, thanks! 🙂

“When did Slidex change from having one letter per horizontal key slot to two letters per slot?”

The (plainly utterly indefatigable) Mike Moor points us to some December 1944 Slidex instructions available on Rob van Meel’s site (a copy will cost you two euros plus international postage from the Netherlands), by which time it had changed to two letters per key slot on the horizontal cursor. That narrows the range down dramatically to ‘sometime in 1944’… we’ll just have to keep digging to find out exactly when in 1944. At least this is a question that we can reasonably hope to get a solid answer on!

“When were Slidex Series B code cards introduced?”

In the Series A “RE No. 2” (Army Code No. 14070) Card 35 that I got from the excellent royalsignals.org.uk website, the three columns have had their shape changed to break up the columnar structure somewhat, which I believe may point to a rethink & upgrade of the Slidex code during WW2.

At the same time, another Series A card has two versions, one with an Army code and another with a different W.O. (War Office) code, which I suspect points to a post-WW2 handover from the Army to the War Office. But that’s as good an answer as this question has for now.

“Did Bletchley Park / GCHQ ever catalogue the tons of files brought back by the TICOM teams?”

Christos replies: “There are many TICOM file categories: I, IF, DF, M, D. Captured German documents had to be catalogued and then translated. This must have taken years. The question is whether there is a full list of those files. There is a DF list but I don’t know about any document covering the other files.”

Incidentally, p.38 of TICOM I-109 (a report by Lt Ludwig of Chi Stelle OB.d.L) says:

B. Slidex system.

Bigram substitution system.
In use in the army (front line units) and in air support networks (tentacle networks).
The system was known from the monitoring of exercises in Great Britain before the invastion, e.g. “Spartan”. The cryptanalytic detachments in army and GAF were able to get so much experience on these exercises that decoding worked well right at the start of the invasion.
Recovery was done in the army again at NAA St 5, in the GAF in 14/3 (W control 3).
Decoding was often done with so little delay that the messages could be dealt with like clear text in the evaluation.
The results were of more importance to the army than to the GAF, but theu provided the latter too with valuable indications, e.g. elucisation of the individual corps tentacle networks, reconnaissance operations (e.g. 400 and 414 Squadrons) etc.
The messages decoded daily were exchanged between Army and GAF in the form of written reports.

As far as just about any cipher I blog about goes, I have days when a solution seems so comically close I could almost accidentally breathe it in. But I also have days when one seems so tragically far away that it may as well be in a sealed box. On the moon. Guarded by killer robot ninjas. All voiced by James Earl Jones.

What’s at issue isn’t anything like pessimism on my part: rather, it’s the question of why anybody would think these might be solvable without doing a whole load of basic, grindy, grafty research first. Really, I think you almost always have to break the external history of these things before you stand much of a chance of extracting their internal contents.

So, if I list some of the open questions that are bugging me about the dead cipher pigeon story right here right now, perhaps you’ll see why that might be the case:-

* Who owned either of the two pigeons listed on the message?
* Were there any pigeon lofts in Bletchingley itself during WW2?
* Did any British pigeon handlers ever use “lib.” as an abbreviation?
* Why hasn’t a single record from a pigeon loft around Tunbridge Wells or Dorking turned up yet?
* Why can’t I find a single other message written on the same printed pigeon service pad?
* Was the pigeon message we have a hectograph or a carbon copy?
* From its skeleton, how old was the dead pigeon? [What a basic question to have to ask!]
* True or false: “many WW2 pigeon messages were sent encrypted”?
* When were Slidex Series B code cards introduced?
* When did Slidex change from having one letter per horizontal key slot to two letters per slot?
* How many syllabic / bigram ciphers were in use in WW2?
* Where is a copy of the Army syllabic cipher book BX 724 or BX 724/RE?
* Did Bletchley Park / GCHQ ever catalogue the tons of files brought back by the TICOM teams?

Personally, when I look at this fairly long list, I don’t feel hugely confident that we genuinely know even close to enough to enable us to solve this mystery, however engaging and intriguing it may be.

But then again, a single answer to any one of these questions from an unexpected corner might well be enough on its own to turn this miserable tide around. So perhaps we should just try to remain optimistic, for a tiny bit of clarity for any one of these might be enough to get us started. Fingers crossed that we shall see (and very soon!)… 🙂

Roughly once a month on a Sunday morning, I take my son Alex along to a local kids’ group called Surrey Explorers for what is almost always a fascinating and hands-on talk about something a little unusual / challenging / stretchy / geeky / fun. Recent talks included “The Science of Zombies” (given by Surbiton zombie kung fu science fan-girl Anna Tanczos) as well as one on all sorts of weird and wonderful anamorphic art. These are normally held at Kingston University’s Kingston Hill campus, not too far from the A3.

Anyway, given that (a) I think Surrey Explorers is great, and (b) I blog about what is surely the coolest (if occasionally utterly ridiculous) geek thing going, I thought it was time to give something back to the group. Which is why I’ll be giving the best cipher mystery talk for kids ever there, entitled “Codes and Ciphers in History and Mystery – from The Hobbit to Winston Churchill” on 3rd February 2013 at 10.30am till 12.30pm. Hence the answer to the question “What’s on in Kingston for kids in February?”, the answer is now officially meeeeeeee.

As you’d expect, there’ll be no big surprises about the subject matter (errr… the clue’s in the title). I’ll be starting with a bit of interactive Hobbity rune stuff (A.K.A. “Futhark”), moving on to some real-life magical ciphers and recipes, then rapidly whizzing through a millennium or so of concealed writing (particularly those mysterious ones that nobody can yet read, Cipher Mysteries regulars will be utterly unsurprised to hear), before finishing up with the latest on that dead pigeon code that has so enthralled the media over recent months.

To end the day, I’ll answer questions on just about any cipher-related question anyone cares to throw my way, and perhaps give some recommendations about cool kids’ books based on ciphers.

If you have children aged 6-13 who this might be fun for, I hope to see you & them there – I’m a big fan of Surrey Explorers, and wish more people knew about it, so it would be great to have a full house!

PS: if you want links to some cipher articles to get you in the mood, I’d suggest
* The Phaistos Disk
* Voynich Manuscript
* Beale Papers
* Rohonc Codex
* The Dorabella Cipher
* The Unknown Man
* The Zodiac Killer